Human upper limb motion is one of the most important exercise limbs that affect the general public's ability in daily life, which is also the most vulnerable part of the limbs. With the improvement and development of science and technology, the number of domestic transport vehicles increases rapidly, and the number of upper limb injuries caused by traffic accidents grows increasingly. Simultaneously, our country and the most countries in the world are entering the aging society. Currently, the population aging rate of our country is ranked second in the world, next only to Japan. Among that, the ratio of population over 65 years old is 10.7% in our country in 2010. The Council for Economic Planning and Development (abbreviated to CEPD, on 22 Jan. 2014, CEPD was merged with Research, Development and Evaluation Commission to form the National Development Council) estimates that it will multiply to 20% in 2025. For elderly people, there are many people with various degrees of degradation or weakening in upper limb ability. With the improvement of living standards, the number of upper limb hemiplegia caused by the heart and cerebrovascular disease is increasing. Cerebral stroke is one of the common diseases, according to Ministry of Health and Welfare's (abbreviated to MOHW) statistics. The number of deaths due to cerebral strokes is about 13,000 per year, which is the second among the top ten leading causes of death in our country. About 17,000 people per year are lead to disability of daily life due to cerebral strokes, which is the most important reason of physical disability in Taiwanese adults, but even one of the top three of using health insurance resources. Therefore, it causes a heavy burden to the family and society and brings patients with great mental and physical torture.
With the increasing maturity of robotic technology, robots have a clear advantage in providing long-term repeatability and quantitative movement. In addition, the robotic technology has been widely used in various fields. A rehabilitation training system is an innovated application of the robot technology in the medical field, and it is also one of topic issues of robot research in domestic and overseas.
Compared to the traditional rehabilitation training methods, it is obvious that the rehabilitation training system has a certain degree of superiority. It can work continuously for a long time and develop different training intensity according to different patients. This not only can reduce the workloads of physical therapists but also through the quantitative exercise to stimulate, detect and evaluate the accumulation of a large number of clinical rehabilitation data, and helps researchers or physical therapists to further understand the relevance of various training data and rehabilitation effects, providing patients with a more scientific rehabilitation training model.
However, as to the existing upper limb exoskeleton assist and rehabilitation training system, the training actions provided by the system are comparatively simple, which are generally limited to rectilinear motions or curvilinear motions of the horizontal plane. The system cannot provide a wide range of space movement. Thus, it cannot give patients more correct exercise sensory stimulation in the early rehabilitation. Besides, the mechanical arm and the patient's limbs are connected through a point to exercise, which cannot provide sufficient strength and flexibility and also has worse pliability and safety. As a result, the user's limbs may be damaged easily by external forces during training. Meanwhile, due to the complex structure of the motor drive system, it is not easy for the mechanism to be light in weight when increasing the degree of freedom of the exoskeleton system. Furthermore, the drive mode is mainly done with the motor. The system has the drawbacks of complex configuration, high rigidity, and lack of pliability. The training modes are few. The most basic requirement of the rehabilitation training is to enable patients to restore the ability of simple daily life. But some of these actions are different from the daily functional actions, which are not very helpful to patients to restore the ability of daily life. Thus, this kind of assistive device and rehabilitation training system is hard to achieve a good rehabilitation effect.
Accordingly, the inventor of the present invention has devoted himself based on his many years of practical experiences to solve these problems.